S P O T ／ SPOT-314

Mt. Ashitake (the Japanese Pyramid)

葦嶽山あしたけやま

Mt. Ashitake, an 815-meter peak in the hills of eastern Shobara, Hiroshima, is the place where Japan's entire 'pyramid mountain' mythology began. Locals had long held it to be the tomb of Emperor Jimmu, Japan's legendary first emperor, but in 1934 the occultist and self-styled pyramid researcher Sakai Katsutoki arrived, looked at a mountain that reads as a clean triangle from every angle, and pronounced it 'the world's oldest pyramid — the main sanctuary, 23,000 years old.' The facing peak, Mt. Kikyo, he declared the worship hall. His theory was elegant in its way: real pyramids, he argued, simply used existing mountains, and only in flat, mountainless places like Egypt did people have to stack stones to fake one. Newspapers nationwide ran with it, and Mt. Ashitake became Japanese Pyramid No. 1, spawning a string of imitators — Mt. Minakami, Mt. Kuromata, the Oishigami stones. On neighboring Mt. Kikyo you'll find the supposed evidence: a 'mirror rock,' a 'direction stone,' a dolmen-like offering table, the 'Jimmu rock,' and a stone ring near the summit said to be a sun altar. None of it survives archaeological scrutiny — these are natural rocks and a natural hill — but as the birthplace of the Japanese pyramid craze, where imperial legend, ancient rock-worship, and 1930s pseudo-history all converge on one triangular peak, it remains genuinely singular. Reaching the megaliths takes a roughly three-hour round-trip hike.